Spirtual America

Pop Life
1st October 2009 to 17th January 2010
Tate Modern, Bankside, London

Good business is the best art - Andy Warhol From Warhol to the YBAs, Koons to Kippenberger, artists have mixed commerce and glamour to promote their public image. Alongside works from these artists, Pop Life also includes pieces from Damien Hirst's 2008 auction and a reconstruction of Keith Haring's Pop Shop.

Please be aware that some works in this exhibition are of a challenging and sexual nature. Admission to three of the rooms is restricted to over-18s.

Daily Mail rounds up the easily offended

Based on article from dailymail.co.uk

A nude photograph of Brooke Shields at the age of ten is to be displayed at the Tate Modern. The decision to display the photograph of the actress has 'shocked' critics and nutters, who predictably called for it to be withdrawn.

Richard Prince's 1983 image of Miss Shields entitled Spiritual America , shows her naked, oiled and wearing make-up, looking directly at the viewer. It is hung in a room at the gallery in London with a notice on the door warning visitors they may find the image challenging .

The artist described it as an extremely complicated photo of a naked girl who looks like a boy made up to look like a woman .

Michele Elliott founder of children's charity Kidscape criticised the gallery's decision to exhibit the picture as a work of art: This is the kind of excuse people make for showing soft kiddy porn and I can't think anyone would want their child portrayed this way and I think it is obscene to do so. She is not old enough at that age to give consent for this to be taken.

This has been put in a pouty adult way, it sounds like, and to masquerade under the guise of edgy art is ridiculous. It is soft kiddy porn. Putting a sign on the door like that means every paedophile in the land will head straight to that room.

Simon Calvert, a spokesman for The Christian Institute added: I think that any parent of young girls would just be so shocked to hear that a tax-payer funded gallery thinks it is alright to show photographs of a nude ten-year-old in the middle of a pornography exhibition.

How far do things have to go before we eventually say enough is enough. They took legal advice to see what they could get away with. Why didn't they take advice from ordinary parents and the public as to what's appropriate.

A spokesman for the Tate said the photograph was an important work and had taken legal advice before displaying it. Assault on the senses:

The exhibition also features huge sexually explicit images of penetration and works made from the pages of pornographic magazines.

A display due to go on show to the public at Tate Modern has been withdrawn after a warning from Scotland Yard that the naked image of actor Brooke Shields aged 10 and heavily made up could break obscenity laws.

The work, by American artist Richard Prince and entitled Spiritual America, was due to be part of the London gallery's new Pop Life exhibition . It has been removed from display after a visit to Tate Modern by officers from the obscene publications unit of the Metropolitan police.

The exhibition had been open to members of the Tate today before opening to the public tomorrow. A Tate spokeswoman confirmed that the display had been temporarily closed down and the catalogue for the exhibition withdrawn from sale. The work had been accompanied by a warning, and the Tate had sought legal advice before displaying it.

The decision by officers to visit Tate Modern is understood to have been made after police chiefs saw coverage of the exhibition in newspapers, rather than as a result of complaints.

Officers met gallery bosses and are also understood to have consulted the Crown Prosecution Service as to whether the image broke obscenity laws.

A Scotland Yard source said the actions of its officers were common sense and were taken to pre-empt any breach of the law. The source said the image of Shields was of potential concern because it was of a 10-year-old, and could be viewed as sexually provocative.

The work has been shown recently in New York, without attracting major controversy, where it gave the title to the 2007 retrospective of Prince's work at the Guggenheim Museum. Prince has described the image as resembling a body with two different sexes, maybe more, and a head that looks like it's got a different birthday.

What have we come to when Mr Plod can walk into a major art gallery and demand the withdrawal of a work on display?

I wish that the management had had the courage to tell Plod to do his worst.

An attempt to prosecute the director of the Tate galleries for paedophile pornography might just have made people wake up.

Offsite: Were police right to warn Tate Modern?

See article from indexoncensorship.org by John Ozimek

As the law stands, the Met almost certainly have a point. The Protection of Children Act 1978 makes it illegal to possess or distribute indecent images of children. Indecency is not defined precisely in law, that is for a jury to determine, but over the years the courts have evolved a categorisation of imagery that ranges from level 1 (least serious) to level 5 (most serious).

For an image to be deemed illegal at level one, Crown Prosecution Service Guidelines require only that it include elements of erotic posing.

Level one is problematic. First, because it is at the lower end of what society considers wrong: in fact, it includes images that significant sections of society do not consider to be wrong at all. So it is the place where police and authorities are most likely to be accused of over-reacting.

...read full article

The Tate Modern is displaying dozens of hardcore pornographic images in an exhibition already dogged by controversy over a naked picture of Brooke Shields.

However, visitors to the opening day of the Pop Life exhibition were confronted with other, far more explicit imagery, including a video installation of a female artist, Andrea Fraser, who paid a stranger $20,000 to have sexual intercourse with her on camera.

A room devoted to the artist Jeff Koons features giant canvases of hardcore sexual acts, while another room is lined with images taken from pornographic magazines. They are the work of Cosey Fanni Tutti, a one-time porn actress formerly known as Christine Newby.

The installations carried an over-18s warning but gallery staff made no attempt to verify visitors' ages, and many of those viewing the exhibition on its first day were teenagers.

Hugh McKinney, chairman of the National Family Campaign, said the works had no place in a gallery visited by families. You have to ask if this is appropriate material for a gallery as prestigious as the Tate. There is a fine line between art and pornography in some cases. Families visit the Tate, and there is a real possibility that under-age and impressionable young people could see these works.

The room which was to have displayed the Brooke Shields picture by artist Richard Prince stood empty yesterday. The Tate temporarily withdrew the image following a visit by officers from the Metropolitan Police obscene publications unit, but is debating whether to reinstate it with a more detailed warning about its content displayed on the wall outside.

Spiritual America has been displayed in public before, including in a 2007 retrospective of Prince's work at the Guggenheim Museum in New York where it did not cause major controversy. And even though the Pop Life catalogue containing Prince's photograph has been withdrawn from the Tate Modern bookshop, a simple Google search allows anyone to view the image and print it out.

Which is exactly what I did. I decided that the postmodern thing to do in this situation was to show gallery visitors a colour printout of Prince's photograph of Gross's photograph in order to give people a chance to judge for themselves what to make of the picture of Brooke Shields.

...Read full article

From a Tate Modern press release regarding the Richard Prince work Spiritual America:

In consultation with the artist, Richard Prince, Tate has replaced Spiritual America 1983 with a later version of the work made by him in collaboration with Brooke Shields, Spiritual America IV 2005 . The room reopens to the public on Tuesday 13 October 2009. Tate is in ongoing discussions with legal advisors about the catalogue.

Well, if the work is deemed to be indecent, the Tate will have no option but to destroy all copies of the catalogue. Maybe they could call in the Met to do the burning...